… Those theories, however, at best explain the twentieth 2 century, rather than the historical pattern more generally. Until the late nineteenth century, governments were not growing very rapidly. The standard public choice accounts do not contain enough institutional differentiation to account for no government growth in one period and rapid government growth in another period. Some structural shift occurred in the late nineteenth…

… Ideologies changed, in part, because intellectuals perceived a benefit to promoting ideas of larger government, rather than promoting classical liberalism. It remains necessary to identify the change in social conditions that drove this trend…

… For instance, state activity invariably expands in wartime, if only to fight the war. Taxes increase, resources are conscripted, and economic controls are implemented. When the war is over, some of these extensions of state power remain in place. The twentieth century, of course, has seen the two bloodiest and most costly wars in history, the two World Wars…

Ma anche la teoria del ratchet effect ha i suoi buchi…

… The example of Sweden is instructive. Sweden avoided both World Wars, and had a relatively mild depression in the 1930s, but has one of the largest governments, relative to the size of its economy, in the developed world. The war hypothesis also does not explain all of the chronology of observed growth. Many Western countries were well on a path towards larger government before the First World War. And the 1970s were a significant period for government growth in many nations, despite the prosperity and relative calm of the 1960s…

… Under this hypothesis, widespread voting was the central force behind the move to larger government. The small governments of the early nineteenth century are portrayed as the tools of ruling elites. But once the franchise was extended, the new voters demanded welfare state programs, which account for the bulk of government expenditure…

I problemi legati a questa ipotesi non mancano…

… First, non-democratic regimes, such as Franco's Spain, illustrate similar patterns of government Along these lines, Husted and Kenny (1997a), looking at data from state governments, find that the elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests leads to higher turnout and higher welfare spending. Lott and Kenny (1999) find that women’s suffrage had some role in promoting greater government expenditures… Second, much of the Western world was fully democratized by the 1920s. Most governmental growth comes well after that date, and some of it, such as Bismarck’s Germany, comes well before that time. Third, and most fundamentally, white male property owners today do not favor extremely small government, though they do tend to be more economically conservative than female voters…

… The historian S.E. Finer (1997a, 1997b) first suggested that technology was behind the rise of big government, though he did not consider this claim in the context of public choice issues. Bradford DeLong’s unpublished manuscript, “Slouching Towards Utopia,” sometimes available on the web in various parts, appears to cover related themes…

… Transportation has made it possible to extend the reach of modern bureaucracy across geographic space. The railroad allowed the North to defeat the South in the Civil War. More generally, cheap transportation increased the reach and power of a central Federal government. Federal employees, police, and armies can travel to all parts of the country with relative ease. Transportation allows published bureaucratic dictates to be distributed and shipped at relatively low expense…

… a wealthier economy will have many citizens working at legitimate, regular businesses with a distinct physical locale… The growth of the publicly owned, limited liability corporation, also helped create the systematic records that make corporate taxation possible. Collecting taxes is easier in an economically advanced environment…

… Assume that we had no cars, no trucks, no planes, no telephones, no TV or radio, and no rail network. Of course we would all be much poorer. But how large could government be? Government might take on more characteristics of a petty tyrant, but we would not expect to find the modern administrative state, commanding forty to fifty percent of gross domestic product in the developed nations, and reaching into the lives of every individual daily…

… The lag between technology and governmental growth is not a very long one. The technologies discussed above all had 10 slightly different rates of arrival and dissemination, but came clustered in the same general period. With the exception of the railroads and the telegraph (both coming into widespread use in the mid-nineteenth century), none predated the late nineteenth century, exactly the time when governmental growth gets underway in most parts of the West…

… This is exactly what we observe. Prior to the American railroads, which arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, private business corporations were not typically very large. The costs of control and large-scale organization were simply too high and no single business had a truly national reach… Following the railroads, large corporations arose in steel, oil, and later automobiles, to name a few examples. The United States Steel Corporation was the largest of the new behemoths. The J.P. Morgan banking syndicate created the company in 1901, through a 4 On the rail numbers, see Warren (1996, p.2). On the growth of large rail companies, see Chandler (1965). 11 merger of numerous smaller firms. The new company owned 156 major factories and employed 168,000 workers. The capitalization was $1.4 billion, an immense sum for the time…

Le fusioni erano all’ordine del giorno…

… Other very large companies followed, including General Electric, National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), American Can Company, Eastman Kodak, U.S. Rubber (later Uniroyal), and AT&T, among others…

… Consider a society of hunter-gatherers, as we still find in the Pygmies of Central Africa. Under some interpretations Pygmy society has a kind of anarchy. The reason for this state of affairs is obvious. It is not due to the Pygmy electoral system, Pygmy ideology, or the infrequency of Pygmy war. The Pygmies simply do not have any large-scale formal institutions of any kind. A typical Pygmy family (at least those who continue to live a traditional Pygmy existence; there are migrants to other cultures) will not own any more than its members can carry on their collective backs, when moving from hunting camp to hunting camp. Given this low level of technology, big government, for the Pygmies, simply is not an option…

… The Persians therefore governed through a simple formula, as explained by Finer (1997a, pp.297-8): “[They] set themselves the most limited objectives possible, short of losing control: in brief, to provide an overarching structure of authority throughout the entire territory which confined itself to two aims only: tribute and obedience. Otherwise nothing.”…

… Nile ran through most of the Egyptian kingdoms and served as a highway… the best communications system of the ancient world…

Riepilogando:

… "For thousands of years mankind had no large-scale empires or bureaucracies. Suddenly government became much larger in Sumeria, Egypt, and other locales, and has stayed large." While our historical understanding of this period is incomplete, new technologies appear to have been central to the growth of empire in that time. The same advances that boosted living standards also boosted centralized rule…

… “In principle the emperor knew no substantive or procedural limits to his authority, and the localities, down to the 14 villages, were supposedly completely controlled and directed from his palace.” In reality, however, the reach of the emperor was quite modest. Finer (1997a, p.73) tells us that in Imperial China “the scope of the central government was, of course, very much narrower than in our own day.”…

… They could not issue, communicate, and enforce the kind of detailed laws and regulations that emanate from Western governments today. So for much of recorded human history we had a combination of oppressive local governments, on a small scale geographically, combined with the payment of tribute to an external central ruler…

… Per capita income ranges around $400, literacy rates run about fifteen percent, and life expectancy barely exceeds forty. The rate of malaria infection is almost one hundred percent… Most parts of the country have neither electricity nor running water…. Few people have cars… oral culture… relies very little on newspapers… Haitian countryside lives in a state of virtual anarchy…

… Those technologies made mass culture possible and in the realm of politics that mass culture translated into fascism. Only after bitter experience did fascist ideas become less popular and social and political norms subsequently evolved to protect electorates against the fascist temptation. In any case, these examples raise the question of whether we might see a subsequent evolution of institutions today, reversing how mass media and technology have shaped our politics…

… The more open the economy, the more risk that individuals face from the perturbations of larger world markets. These citizens then tend to favor more government intervention, not less, to protect themselves against those risks… Canada is a more “open” economy than is the United States, yet it typically has greater government intervention and higher levels of government spending… Nordic economies are both very open and have lots of government spending…